carry them out into the Atlantic.”
“If they landed anywhere in Britain, they’d cause chaos. The first step, of course, is to test the idea with smaller models. Can you help?”
“My son can load them with lead soldiers.”
I learned that an aeronautical device that looks logical on paper can prove maddeningly difficult in practice. Even on calm days our experiments tended to drift unpredictably. One ran into a church tower, and another exploded in a bright ball of flame from a cause we never discovered. A line broke on a third balloon, its basket tilted, and Harry’s toy soldiers tumbled out in a distressing dribble that extended across three cow pastures. I spent an afternoon helping him look for his little army. He still cried when seven stayed missing. Astiza decided she didn’t want my son around eccentric inventors and kept him with her.
Next, Thilorier and I built a one-third-scale mock-up, a project still so vast that it required a silk bag twice as big as those usually sewn. To test its lifting capacity, we invited cadets from the École Militaire to climb aboard, but their professors wouldn’t let us risk them. Instead, we flew ourselves with two hobbled donkeys, a pig, and fifty bags of millet. The combination was a poor choice because the animals kept trying to get at the grain.
It was a fine October day, the last leaves turning, and initially I found it fun to drift over farmyards and wave at pretty milkmaids below. But the sun on dark harvested fields created a thermal of rising air that lifted us higher than we planned, and when the savant released gas to bring us down, we plunged once we drifted out of the updraft. We eventually crashed into trees and had to hire three farm laborers to help lower the terrified animals with a rope. The bag was ruined.
When Thilorier asked for more money to try a full-scale version, he was turned down. “We do not believe your experiments are sufficiently advanced to chance the fortunes of a regiment,” the War Ministry informed us.
I was relieved. I’m happy to lend ingenuity, but Thilorier was balmy.
Astiza was having better luck.
A peculiarity of Paris, and a sight that added to the nervous edge of the times, was the constant cortege of funeral wagons taking exhumed bones from city cemeteries and dumping them into new catacombs. These underground ossuaries were established in the tunnels of limestone quarries that ran under the capital. More than a millennia of burials had crammed city churchyards so full of remains that there was no room for either the dead to sleep or the living to redevelop, so more than a million corpses had already been dug up, dusted off, and wheeled through the streets for quick reinternment, the skulls anonymous as cobblestones. Authorities said there were famous people in the bunch, but you couldn’t tell their notoriety now.
Harry asked about the funeral wagons with detached fascination; while he understood in theory that he would someday die, at age four the prospect is an abstraction. He liked the way men doffed their hats as the big black dray horses plodded by, and the rattle of their cargo.
One day my wife proposed that we descend to this bizarre new crypt.
“All in good time,” I tried to joke.
“The catacombs are deserted at night. Even after the rationality of the revolution, men fear spirits. But that gives us privacy. A chemist asked that we meet him there.”
“A chemist? Do we need drugs?”
“We need his guidance, and it was mere chance I stumbled upon him. In the Bibliothèque Nationale I finally got access to some archives from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which, as you know, were the height of religious conflict and philosophic speculation in Europe.”
“I didn’t know, but go on.” People are always fighting and always speculating, it seems to me, and I’m not certain why historians bother to keep track.
“From those books in the Mazarine Gallery I descended to the library’s crypt, a warren of shelves stuffed under low Roman arches. Candles dimly light it, the shelves are dark oak, and the heavy leather-bound volumes have the scent of age and lost wisdom. It’s called the Saint-Denis scriptorium, named for the patron saint of Paris, the early Christian martyr.”
“The stink of lost wisdom,” I corrected. “Mildew.”
“I was searching for histories of the monk Albertus Magnus, looking for references to this Brazen Head. One tome had mention of an automaton, calling it no more than a legend, but